Many MSSP relationships are doomed at the on-boarding stage when the organization first becomes a customer. Given how critical the first 2-8 weeks of your MSSP partnership are, let’s explore it a bit.

Here are a few focus areas to note (this, BTW, assumes that both sides are in full agreement about the scope of services and can quote from the SOW if woken up at 3AM):

Technology deployment: unless MSSP sensors are deployed and are able to capture logs, flows, packets, etc, you don’t yet have a monitoring capability. Making sure that your devices log – and sending logs to the MSSP sensor – is central to this (this also implies that you are in agreement on what log messages they need for their analysis – yes, I am talking about you, authentication success messages :-))

Access methods and credential sharing: extra-critical for device management contracts, no amount of SLA negotiation will help your partner apply changes faster if they do not have the passwords (this also implies that you log all remote access events by the MSSP personnel and then send these logs to …. oops!)

Context information transfer: lists of assets (and, especially, assets considered critical by the customer), security devices (whether managed by the MSSP or not), network diagrams, etc all make a nice information bundle to share with the MSSP partner

Contacts and escalation trees: critical alerts are great, but not if the only person whose phone number was given to the MSSP is on a 3 week Caribbean vacation… Escalation and multiple current contacts are a must.

Process synchronization: now for the fun part: your risk assessment (maybe) and incident response (likely) processes may now be “jointly run” with your MSSP, but have you clarified the touch points, dependencies and information handoffs?

If you, the MSSP client, fail to follow through with these, the chance of success is severely diminished. Now, as my research on MSSP progresses, the amount of sad hilarity I am encountering piles on – and you don’t want to be part of that! For example, an MSSP asks a client: “To improve our alert triage, can we please get the list of your most critical assets?” The client response? “Damn, we’d like to know that too!” When asked for their incident response plan, another client sheepishly responded that they don’t have it yet, but can we please create it together – that is, only if it doesn’t cost extra…. BTW, if your MSSP never asked you about your IR plans during on-boarding, run, run, run (it is much better to actually walk thru an incident scenario together with your MSSP at this stage).

In another case, a client asked an MSSP “to monitor for policy violations.” When asked for a copy of their most recent security policy, the client responded that it has not been created yet. On the other hand, a sneaky client once scheduled a pentest of their network during the MSSP onboarding period – but after their sensors were already operational. You can easily imagine the painful conversations that transpired when the MSSP failed to alert them…. Note that all of the above examples and quotes are fictitious, NOT based on real clients and are entirely made up (which is the same as fictitious anyway, right? Just wanted to make sure!)

Overall, our recent poll of MSSP clients indicated that most wished they’d spent more time on-boarding their MSSPs. Expect things to be very much in flux for at least several weeks – your MSSP should ask a lot of questions, and so should you! While your boss may be tempted by the promises of fast service implementation, longer on-boarding often means better service for the next year. Of course, not every MSSP engagement starts with a 12-week hardcore consulting project involving 4 “top shelf” consultants, but such timeline for a large, complex monitoring and management effort is not at all offensive. In fact, one quality MSSP told me that they can deploy the service much faster than it takes their clients to actually fulfill their end of the bargain (share asset info, contacts, deploy sensors, tweak the existing processes, etc).

Additional Resources

Anton Chuvakin
Research VP and Distinguished Analyst8 years with Gartner 19 years IT industry

Anton Chuvakin is a Research VP and Distinguished Analyst at Gartner's GTP Security and Risk Management group. Before Mr. Chuvakin joined Gartner, his job responsibilities included security product management, evangelist… Read Full Bio

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